HTML5 Semantics

HTML5 Semantics

HTML5 brought in a raft of new tags which aimed to make web markup more semantic.

A study was made of the most common class names from HTML4.0 and XHTML, and from the results new tags were chosen, such as <header>, <footer>, and so on.

HTML5 includes a lot more than just these new semantic tags, but they serve as an easy way to quickly get using some HTML5 in your code straight away.

HTML5 aimed to make individual modules of code reusable across different scenarios, and this can be demonstrated by new tags like <article>, which can themselves be useful even by themselves. Blogs which have already been switched to HTML5 are good examples of the use of the <article> tag where small exerpts from posts are provided together as summaries on the homepage.

Such was the excitement surrounding HTML5 that many of us had started using it even before the W3C specification had been completed. Browser support arrived surprisingly early in modern browsers who felt that the spec was solid enough to start using.

There is relatively little functionality, as such, that surrounds many of these new HTML5 tags and as such you can provide backward compatibility with little more than a simple reset javascript.